First Flight of SpaceShipOne into Space

On June 21, 2004, I joined twenty seven thousand other people to watch the
launch of SpaceShipOne, the first private-venture craft to attempt to leave
the earth's atmosphere and enter space, defined as an altitude of 100 kilometers
(62 miles). I and the other afflicted technophiles gathered
in the pitch blackness of Mojave airport in California sometime after 3
AM, to await the 6:30 AM takeoff. As you can see from this
photo, our particular religious devotion has its own special rituals and
posturing. Various luminaries such as Arnold Schwarzenegger,
the Governator of California, John Travolta (a long-time fan of aeronautics)
and former astronaut Buzz Aldrin were also on hand - but you can be sure
they weren't slumming it with the rest of us!

The object of our devotion duly appeared, the rocket-powered SpaceShipOne
slung below the twin-jet White Knight carrier aircraft. Both
were specially designed by Burt Rutan and his Scaled Composites company.
Rutan is absolutely no stranger to weird and wonderful aircraft - his most
famous effort to date is Voyager, which flew around the world in 1986 without
refuelling.

Look closely in this shot and you'll see the pilot of SpaceShipOne waving
his hand through one of the portholes. He's 63 year old Michael
Melvill, a veteran test pilot.

These two aircraft
are really like no other planes you're ever likely to see, unless of course
it's something else that Rutan has cooked up!

Before
the White Knight and StarShipOne took off, a couple of chase planes got
into the air, including this executive transport manufactured by Beech
Aircraft. If you're thinking that it looks seriously weird,
that's because it was designed by none other than - Burt Rutan!
He worked on the Beech Starship in the early 1980s when Beech approached
Scaled Composites to do some work under contract. Although
very innovative, the Starship never took off (if you'll pardon the pun)
and only 50 or 60 were ever built.

But
back to the main event - here's White Knight and StarShipOne on their takeoff
run.

In this photo you
can clearly see the twin tail booms of White Knight, and the twin tails
of SpaceShipOne.

The White Knight
drops SpaceShipOne when they reached an altitude of about 50,000 feet (15
kilometers), and it takes 30 or 40 minutes for them to reach this altitude.
Along the way they levelled out for some time while they checked all of
the onboard systems.

Here's the StarShip
chase plane doing its thing as they continue climbing.

As they spiralled
higher above the desert, it became harder to even see where they were;
eventually, though, they got high enough for contrails to start forming.
Finally, around 7:50AM and 47,000 feet (14,250 meters) the White Knight
released SpaceShipOne, which glided for about 10 seconds then lit its rocket
engine.

The Air Force were
doing the official altitude measurements using their equipment at Edwards
Air Force Base, some miles east of Mojave. This made it necessary
for the launch to be made in that area, which caused a serious problem
for the crowd who came to view the spectacle - at release time, the crowd
had to look directly towards the sun, and the two aircraft were directly
below the sun, which meant that they would pass in front of the sun and
make viewing and photography impossible.

However, 100 kilometers
is an awful long way up, so shortly into its 80-second burn, SpaceShipOne
climbed above the angle of the sun into clear blue sky.

We didn't realize
it at the time, but there were a couple of serious malfunctions as the
craft accelerated to more than Mach 2.9 (2150 mph or 3460 km/h).
About 7 seconds after ignition, a 60 knot (70 mph or 110 km/h) wind shear
caused an unintended 90 degree rotation, which the pilot corrected.
Just 10 seconds after starting its climb it reached Mach 1, and the rocket
continued burning for another 66 seconds before automatically shutting
down. Late during this powered phase, one of the motors which
control the trim adjustment malfunctioned and although Melvill quickly
swapped to a backup system the ship wasn't quite at the right angle as
it climbed. The combined anomalies put it 20 miles off course
and ultimately cost about 30,000 feet of altitude. This very
nearly resulted in the failure of the test to reach its initial goal of
100 kilometers, in fact SpaceShipOne ended up getting to an altitude of
100,124 meters - only one tenth of one percent above its target altitude,
and quite a long way short of the intended altitude of 108,000 meters..

SpaceShipOne was
at 180,000 feet when the last nitrous oxide oxidizer on board was applied
to the 600 pounds of rubber-like fuel, but it continued coasting and eventually
reached 328,491 feet. The pilot was weightless for three and
a half minutes and used this time to float some M & M candies around
the cabin, all in the name of Science, of course.

There might have
been problems, but the outcome could have been a whole lot worse than this;
the pilot even said afterwards that he had contemplated aborting the flight
and bailing out, a very risky procedure in itself.

Live transmissions
of radio communications between the ground controllers and SpaceShipOne
were supposed to be broadcast throughout the flight, but in the end this
didn't materialize, perhaps because of the problems on the way up, and
everyone on the ground was left wondering what was happening.
As the descent began there was another serious problem, a loud bang which
the pilot Michael Melvill later said left him "pretty scared".
The crowd heard a bang, too - in fact two bangs, which were the sonic booms
caused as SpaceShipOne re-entered the atmosphere, eventually experiencing
5Gs of force and accelerating again to Mach 2.9. Then we started
to see a tiny dot glinting in the sun high above us, and then coming lower
with several chase planes around it to record the event.

Having
burned all of its fuel, SpaceShipOne was now just a glider, but a pretty
good one, doing a couple of circuits before quickly bleeding off speed
to land on the same runway it had taken off from an hour or so earlier.
If you look at the next three closeups of StarShipOne landing, you can
see the damage which caused the pilot such concern as he descended; underneath
the rocket nozzle there's a kinked section of the outer skin.
This was the first time this larger nozzle was used, so it looks like it's
back to the drawing board for a while!

It's
interesting to see that it doesn't have a front wheel, only a skid.
This is done to conserve weight, which is also the reason why the rear
wheels are so tiny. There's a very fine line between engineering
this sort of thing so that it's "just good enough" rather than "not quite
good enough"; on its first powered flight, the left landing gear collapsed
during the landing and SpaceShipOne ended up veering off the runway into
the dirt, though fortunately not much damage was done.

If you look closely you can see the phrase "A Paul G Allen project" on
the tail boom. Paul Allen is the co-founder with Bill Gates
of Microsoft, and he's sunk over $20 million into this project.
The initial goal is to win the $10 million "Ansari X Prize", which will
be awarded to the first privately-funded group which launches a pilot and
two passengers (or the equivalent in ballast) into space, and then repeats
the feat within two weeks. In the longer term, though, Rutan
and Allen hope to start a space tourism industry, which will pay its own
way and perhaps lead to further private ventures in space.

Having all of that money backing him up has allowed Rutan to do very thorough
testing before he finally goes for the X Prize. For instance,
today's flight into space is actually the fifteenth flight that SpaceShipOne
has made, most of them as a glider, but others under its own power (it
broke the speed of sound during its first powered flight, while climbing
at a forty-five degree angle).

SpaceShipOne's large
tails pivot out during the descent from the top of its flight, in order
to produce drag and so angle the craft correctly for re-entry.
At the top of its trajectory there isn't enough atmosphere to use normal
aircraft flight surfaces to control the attitude of the craft, so cold
gas jets are used to push it one way or the other.

A well-deserved victory pass by the StarShip chase plane; from this angle
you can see how truly unusual it is.

Not to be outdone, the White Knight also does a victory pass.

A truly remarkable aircraft!

Coming in to land
with that bizarre quadricycle landing gear and crazy portholes, which must
give much less visibility than regular windshields.